"Jag har tänkt på en sak" : En samtalsanalytisk studie om beslutsfattande och rättigheten att presentera ett förslag i en möteskontext

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study is to investigate how the decision-making process is constructed in management team meetings within an IT consulting company. The study also aims to examine how these decisions are initiated by people with different degrees of authority in the organization, as well as how the asymmetric relationship is established. The material that forms the basis of the study consists of one hour and forty-five minutes of video recording of meetings that took place over the Microsoft Teams platform. The study is based on the theoretical framework of conversation analysis (CA) which contributes with an empirical micro-analysis of the material. The result is thus placed in context to previous conversation analytic research that concerns decision-making, decisionmaking as a social process, deontic rights, and the right to distribute tasks in a meeting context. The result shows how the participants construct decision-making by presenting a proposal or by assigning a task, as well as what differences can be distinguished between superiors and subordinates. In order to present a proposal or assign a task, the participants account for their right to do so by, among other things, referring to subjective experiences, or referring to another authority. Subordinates, e.g., accounts are often long and abstract in their presentation. In contrast, superiors, in this case the CEO, are often short and concrete when presenting a proposal or assigning a task. This in turn results in the establishment of the asymmetric relationship since the right to present proposals do not take place on equal terms.